Organizing your Research

I frequently am asked to recommend ways to organize research. I don't use any particular software myself and tend to go old school when I'm collecting research: plain old Word document for my bibliography, maybe an excel spreadsheet for a literature matrix. Maybe.

I've heard of all the terrific different options for free software (Zotero, EasyBib, NoodleTools) but I was just in Houston chatting with students and heard a terrific suggestion: keeping a blog to organize research. This student had a blog where he created an ongoing annotated bibliography, assigning specific labels to each entry. The cloud related to topics then built and built and built until he could see where, specifically, the research focus was heading. Pretty cool if you ask me. Of course, everything on the blog was searchable to boot.

I tried to find his blog just now and didn't have any luck but I did find a few cool sites related to blog research. Here's one with lots of links on the topic that seemed pretty darn interesting.